Kant, God and Metaphysics by Kanterian Edward;

Author:Kanterian, Edward;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-10-30T16:00:00+00:00

p.218

Wood advances an interesting consideration: ‘On Kant’s behalf it might be replied that the actual existence of things suffices to show it impossible that there should be a necessarily empty world.’104 This conclusion can be reached even without accepting Kant’s account of the data of possibility (the Modal Principle). If there were no possible object, the world would be necessarily empty. But since the actual existence of things, in this world, entails their possibility, it is false that there could be a necessarily empty world.105 This, however, is a weaker claim than Kant’s. Kant’s claim is not premised on the existence of things. It is simply that it is impossible that nothing exists, from which it follows that necessarily something exists. Even if we can show that it is impossible that necessarily there could have been nothing, this does not exclude that there could have been nothing.

Wood then suggests that Kant’s actual claim, that something necessarily exists, can be proven formally. To do this we need to accept not only the premise ‘Possibly something exists’, but also Kant’s account of the data of possibility. ‘Possibly something exists’ is taken by Wood in the de re reading, as ‘it is necessarily true that the world is not empty’. Valuable as this approach is, the non-empty world interpretation does not help Kant, since he is not merely interested in proving that the world could not have been empty. That would merely show that some possible object in the world had to exist. But any object in the world is a created object, as is the world as a whole, on Kant’s theistic view. Kant wants to prove the existence of God, and God is not an object in the world or identical to a world. Kant needs the premise that it is impossible that there should have been no possibility whatsoever. At any rate, Wood’s ingenious formalisation of Kant’s proof uses first order propositional modal logic.106 Take ‘P’ to stand for ‘Something exists’.

Argument III

(1) ◊P ⇒ P (or □(◊P → P))107 Kant’s Modal Principle

(2) ◊P → □◊P modal logic axiom

(3) P ⇒ ◊P modal logic axiom108

(4) P ↔ ◊P 1, 3

(5) (□Q & (Q ↔ R)) → □R logical truth

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